The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain [INFOGRAPHIC] Admit it: As you're reading this, you have tunnel vision — that feeling that the world is closing in on you after surfing the Internet for eight straight hours. Web dead head (yes, I made that up) is a growing concern for today's connected generation, which collectively spends 35 billion hours on the Internet every month. But we're not just talking one online shopping experience at a time. Often, we have four tabs open, cycling between emails and shopping, tweeting and word processing.
Such multi-tasking actually raises stress levels and lowers creative thinking overall, according to the research compiled by ForensicPsychology.net. SEE ALSO: Your Desk Job Makes You Fat, Sick and Dead [INFOGRAPHIC] Turns out, multi-tasking online doesn't positively exercise our brains or mental state. Scared? Thumbnail courtesy of iStockphoto, Firstsignal. Domain Names 101: How to Avoid Dot-Com Disasters [INFOGRAPHIC] The overflow of quick and witty reaction tweets to the new iPad name proves a name is never just a name. This applies for domain names, too. Here are tips to help you avoid these classic dot-com disasters — poolife.com, therapistsfinder.com or IPallover.com. DomainNameSales.com, a name registration and web hosting company, created an infographic to teach brands domain name 101. The first tip is to invest in your domain name as you would secure a primary location for a storefront.
"Don’t cut corners with your online identity," says Frank Schilling, founder of DomainNameSales.com and an Internet entrepreneur. A great example of this is Diapers.com, which gets an average of 106 million unique visitors. Short, generic, descriptive and memorable adjectives make great website domains. Many businesses make a mistake by quickly choosing to go with a name rather than weighing all the options, Schilling says.
SEE ALSO: Tea Party Domain Name Could Fetch $1 Million Thumbnail courtesy of Flickr, liquene. Mobile Minute: Data Created By 60 Seconds of Smartphone Use. We swim in a world full of data. Every time we play a mobile game and swipe a piece of fruit, shoot a bad guy, fling a furious fowl at a pen of swine or tap an ad, data is being created. Over the days and weeks that data adds up to the point where we can break it down into larger trends and take a full look at the landscape that has been created. That is the macrocosm view. What about the microcosm? How much data are we producing per minute? We found an old infographic from mobile advertising company Mobclix that shows just just how much data we are creating each minute when using our mobile devices.
I have a friend that is obsessed with Fruit Ninja. In that minute, 4,111 ads were clicked in Mobclix's network. App downloads have been growing exponentially in the last few months. Check out the infographic below. HOW TO: Recover from a Social Media PR Disaster. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. You know that awful, "Did I leave the oven on?
" pit-of-your-stomach feeling of dread at a possible screw up? Yeah, well now you can also get that feeling from social media. Nearly anyone managing more than one social profile has felt their stomach drop out when they think they accidentally posted something personal on a professional site. Did I click my avatar, or the company's avatar? What did I just tweet? On social media sites, a rash of Twitter accounts have tumbled into nasty PR disasters. Fortunately there are also some success cases of companies turning bad social media situations into something good.
So you screwed up, now what? What Counts as a PR Disaster? Social media PR disasters comes in a range of fails and embarrassments. There are also slips that can do serious damage to your brand. The Anatomy of a Social Media Crisis. Social media crises are on the rise, but 76% of those that occurred since 2001 could have been diminished or averted with the proper social media investments, according to a report by Altimeter Group released on Wednesday. For the report, entitled "Social Business Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally," Altimeter Group analyzed 50 social media crises that have occurred since 2001 and found that those reaching mainstream media have risen steadily through the past decade, with just 1-2 incidents per year in the first five years and a total of 10 social media crises last year alone.
The report also sheds light on exactly how social media crises arise and how companies can avoid them. The majority of businesses caught up in social media crises lacked proper internal education programs, but the lack of a professional staff, triage system and employee social media policy were also key problem areas for companies. And what were the causes of these crises? Going Viral Visualized. The baby who laughs at ripping paper. The overdramatic chipmunk. Nyan Cat. These characters are forever immortalized in the world of viral Internet content. But what is it about these vastly different pieces of content that make them so ubiquitous and sharable? According to research by ProBlogger.com, whatever makes a video or meme go viral is mysterious, but also follows certain patterns. So if "going viral" is your goal, how can you optimize a campaign to transform into a Web meme goldmine?
Smart money would select an environment where lots of group sharing is going on. What's your favorite viral campaign? Infographic designed by Voltier Digital. 7 Easy Steps For Creating Buzzworthy Content. Few marketers know how to create stellar content without being too promotional. Here are the steps to buzzworthiness. October 17, 2011 We've heard for years now that "content is king"—yet so few marketers seem to understand how to create useful content that isn't overly promotional for the brands supporting it. Even for those who understand the importance of rich content, though, it can be costly to get a content strategy up and running. Here are his seven essential steps for creating buzzworthy content. 1. Leverage your resources on your staff, coworkers, customers and fans," says Durwin. 2. Once you've found the individuals within your organization that are already participating in or are very excited about creating content, assign tasks to those people based on what they are interested in and would like to contribute.
Common tasks could including taking pictures, shooting video, tweeting, updating Facebook, blogging and updating the company's website. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Internet of Yesterday & Today: 1996 vs. 2011 [INFOGRAPHIC] Where were you in 1996? If you were in cyberspace, surfing the World Wide Web, chances are you were waiting a long time for pages to load, laughing at the first Internet meme and suffering through some god-awful graphics. My, how times have changed! While some of you weren't even born yet, I was working on the web back then, and it certainly did feel different from today. Most comments came via email, servers were rickety and crash-prone, and even though HTML coding was a lot simpler, it still took a lot of patience to get things done. SEE ALSO: AOL Eyes Merger With Yahoo [REPORT] But you know what? Did you see this coming?
UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Bill Vandermark for pointing out that Go Daddy was in fact founded in 1997, and would not become Go Daddy until 1999. Infographic courtesy Online University. Infographic: What Tools Developers Actually Use. Infographic: Most Disruptive Companies in Tech - ReadWriteCloud. Focus has pulled together an infographic on the most disruptive companies in tech. It should come as little surprise that many of the innovations are cloud-powered, or cloud-dependent. Consider the iPad, for instance. Apple's the clear leader in the tablet market, and eating away at the traditional computing market.
Apple owns more than 68% of the tablet market, and is replacing laptops, e-readers and handheld games. What's that got to do with cloud? Plenty. Focus also highlights Netflix. Finally, there's music service Pandora.